Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute, after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,--whether it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor courtesies,--the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded. Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not previously met with, and she had got--again she reproached herself--into an elderly groove. Jim's friends,--well, they had been different, but not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a finicking lot. When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all. She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.